Importance of Level of Service in Asset Management

Is it about service or is it about assets? – Grant Holland

Ross:

Taking the US example, I was recently reading Fortune magazine, which is one of the major business magazines in the US. I was looking at where Fortune 500 companies, these are massive global companies, are located.

And certainly if you’re in a state or a city or municipality that has one of those companies there, with the lot of their facilities for manufacturing or whatever, you wouldn’t want to lose them.

They’re major employers and they’re major drivers in inputs into your regional and local economy, and state economy.

So the thing is that you do need to know about them at one level, and make sure that their requirements have been listened to and not getting tempted to up stakes or anything like that.

In another level, and any of us that have been involved for any length of time in asset related fields know – there are these customers that are very vocal and then there’s a whole lot in the middle that don’t make a lot of noise.

I think one of the risks that you run in the asset management field is responding to the noise, and that can be a real problem.

Grant:

Yes, and certainly there are different service expectations for different customers as Ross said.

The issue that we need to think about is it’s the service that we are providing to the community rather than the assets.

The issue is the service that we’re providing to that community and to those stakeholders.

The question that we’ve raised there, is it about service or is it about assets, particularly Infrastructure Canada has done excellent work in that area.

Infrastructure Canada have published some really interesting papers around measuring performance of service and measuring performance of assets.

We talked a lot about condition of assets but when it comes to service it’s really that performance that’s particularly important.

It’s the level of service that we discussed with the community and determined what they actually need is what’s important. Talking about the assets themselves doesn’t tend to get people terribly excited.